Women have substantial advantage in STEM faculty hiring, except when competing against more-accomplished men.

Stephen J Ceci,Wendy M Williams

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01532

Abstract

Audits of tenure-track hiring reveal faculty prefer to hire female applicants over males. However, audit data do not control for applicant quality, allowing some to argue women are hired at higher rates because they are more qualified. To test this, Williams and Ceci (2015) conducted an experiment demonstrating a preference for hiring women over identically-qualified men. While their findings are consistent with audits, they raise the specter that faculty may prefer women over even more-qualified men, a claim made recently. We evaluated this claim in the present study: 158 faculty ranked two men and one woman for a tenure-track-assistant professorship, and 94 faculty ranked two women and one man. In the former condition, the female applicant was slightly weaker than her two male competitors, although still strong; in the other condition the male applicant was slightly weaker than his two female competitors, although still strong. Faculty of both genders and in all fields preferred the more-qualified men over the slightly-less-qualified women, and they also preferred the stronger women over the slightly-less-qualified man. This suggests that preference for women among identically-qualified applicants found in experimental studies and in audits does not extend to women whose credentials are even slightly weaker than male counterparts. Thus these data give no support to the twin claims that weaker males are chosen over stronger females or weaker females are hired over stronger males.

Highlights

Much has been written about the campaign to diversify faculty at American colleges and universities, an effort that started in earnest during the 1980s and continues unabated
Hundreds of analyses of faculty hiring for tenure-track positions have been reported, and the temporal changes in the fraction of female and minority applicants in the American professoriate have been charted (e.g., Smith et al, 2004; Kang and Banaji, 2006; Turner et al, 2008; Niederle et al, 2013)
Despite substantial gains in diversity of faculty, the dominant view appears to be that racial and gender preferences continue to be needed to counter not just historical prejudice and current biases held by faculty—most of which may be implicit, and which result in barriers against hiring women and minorities

Summary

Introduction

Much has been written about the campaign to diversify faculty at American colleges and universities, an effort that started in earnest during the 1980s and continues unabated. With some notable exceptions demonstrating female-friendly hiring preferences by faculty (Williams and Ceci, 2015), there continues to be evidence of implicit and occasionally explicit biases directed at women and ethnic minorities Few of these demonstrations of bias concern hiring of academic science faculty, some of them are indirectly relevant. Notwithstanding the recent pro-female hiring data of Williams and Ceci, there are recent empirical data implying that hiring is sexist and that it possibly forecloses the prospects of the best-qualified female applicants None of these data concern the hiring of academic science faculty by professionals who possess diagnostic information, but they are relevant. We describe a survey study and an experiment that are relevant to gender bias in academic hiring, even though neither involves hiring of professors in male-dominated fields

Methods

Results

Conclusion